Suchergebnisse

There is very little scholarship that considers questions of queerness in relation to film music, and the scholarship that does (Paulin, 1997; Haworth et. al., 2012; Buhler, 2014; Dubowsky, 2016) tends to approach the subject from a representational standpoint, identifying instances in which the soundtrack participates in the representation of queerness in film. The role that the soundtrack plays in fostering queer engagement with film has been left relatively underexplored. In this essay, I assert that the theories of counteridentification and disidentification as articulated by José Esteban Muñoz in his groundbreaking queer of color critique text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Muñoz; 1999) have much to offer scholars of film music interested in exploring questions of identification and auditory and/or emotional spectatorship. I will begin by laying out Muñoz's formulation of these theories and then briefly sketch counteridentification's long history within film music criticism, an academic orientation that sets up Hollywood's musical norms as the product of an oppressive "culture industry" and the disruption of those norms through modernist European musical practices as liberatory counteridentification (Adorno/Eisler; 1947). With these understandings in place, I will move to a discussion of two U.S. films from the 1970s whose soundtracks present Black audiences with audiovisual experiences that invite counteridentification and disidentification respectively: Blacula (William Crain; 1972) and Ganja and Hess (Bill Gunn; 1973).

In this dissertation I argue for the importance of the film soundtrack as affective archive through a consideration of the horror soundtrack. Long dismissed by scholars in both cinema media studies and musicology as one of horror's many manipulative special effects employed in the aesthetically and ideologically uncomplicated goal of arousing fear, the horror soundtrack is in fact an invaluable resource for scholars seeking to historicize changes in cultural sensibilities and public feelings about sexuality. I explore the critical potential of the horror soundtrack as affective archive through formal and theoretical analysis of the role of music in the representation of sexuality in the horror film. I focus on films consumed in the Unites States during the 1970s, a decade marked by rapid shifts in both cultural understanding and cinematic representation of sexuality.My analyses proceed from an interdisciplinary theoretical framework animated by methods drawn from affect studies, American studies, feminist film theory, film music studies, queer of color critique, and queer theory. What is the relationship between public discourses of fear around gender, race, class, and sexuality, and the musical framing of sexuality as fearful in the horror film? I explore this central question through the examination of significant figures in the genre (the vampire, the mad scientist/creation dyad, and the slasher or serial killer) and the musical-affective economies in which they circulate. I argue that attention to the ways in which music interacts with moving images and narrative in the horror genre provides a new way of interrogating the political history of sexuality in the United States, one uniquely equipped to theorize and analyze areas of culture that are often left unanalyzed because of their close engagement with emotions and the body.